Kathleen O’Toole: ‘One more major city in my system’

Former Boston Police Commissioner Kathleen O’Toole speaks to reporters after she was announced as the nominee for Seattle Police Chief. Photographed on Monday, May 19, 2014 at Seattle City Hall. (Joshua Trujillo, seattlepi.com)

Kathleen O’Toole is professing to welcome a feature that often frustrates and even flummoxes public sector managers, educators and even cathedral deans, newly arrived in Seattle: Ours is a city where everyone gets consulted about everything.

“I prefer operating in such a culture,” the Seattle police chief-designee said in an interview Monday. “It is one reason I am here.”

O’Toole had worked as Boston police commissioner, and helped reformed Ireland’s national police force, and was settled into consulting. But comfortable circumstances did not make her comfortable.

“I just didn’t get it all out of my system,” she reflected. “I’m a city cop at heart. I love to be where the rubber meets the road … I thought I had one more in my system … one more major city, and I can’t think of a better one.”

O’Toole identifies Seattle as a city of innovation. So, when word of the SPD chief opening got out — a department that’s had three chiefs in a year, and is under a Justice Department consent decree to reform — O’Toole called up ex-Pasadena, Calif., police chief Bernard Melekian. Melekian has been advising Mayor Ed Murray on law enforcement and public safety.

(Melekian stepped in to rescue interim Chief Harry Bailey at a February news conference when Bailey stumbled in explaining why he removed misconduct findings from the records of six Seattle Police Department officers, including one who confronted a reporter.)

“Barney is one I have always deeply respected,” O’Toole said. “I asked him, ‘Is this (Seattle job) on the level?’ He replied, ‘Absolutely, I am convinced that it is.’ I then decided to throw my hat in the ring.”

O’Toole will be the first woman to serve as Seattle police chief. She has a police background dating to 1979, and a resume that ranged from serving as a Justice Department monitor to teaching constitutional law at Boston’s police academy.

She speaks in managerial terms, but directly and with demonstrably greater self-assurance than Chief John Diaz, who retired in May of last year, or the controversy-dogged Bailey.

O’Toole has witnessed, and did not like, what she called an attitude in the force of “police facing the community,” as well as the “insular culture” of police protecting each other, “that you don’t rat on a fellow officer.”

“Fortunately, the culture has changed,” she said. ”We are attracting different people.”

O’Toole pledged that she will have whistleblowers’ backs, often not the case in recent Seattle Police Department history. She pledged to have “zero tolerance” for those who would obstruct or undermine colleagues who have the integrity to report malfeasance or misconduct.

Murray interviewed O’Toole for the job, but O’Toole was also sizing up Murray.

It is a given that the personal relationship of mayor-police chief is vital to the success of each.

In a famous case, the gargantuan ego of New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani could not stand recognition accorded NYPD Chief Robert Bratton for practices that lowered the city’s crime rate. Bratton was gone shortly after appearing on the cover of Time magazine. (He’s back under new Mayor Bill de Blasio.)

“I think the mayor is looking forward to being mayor: He has a city to run,” O’Toole said. She said, in an understatement, that ongoing travails of the SPD have become a “huge distraction” for Murray as his new administration has tried to grapple with other challenges.

She wants to lower the profile of the SPD, satisfy the Justice Department’s consent decree — she’s had a close working relationship with Justice — and allow officers to adapt procedures “out of the spotlight.”

O’Toole pledges to make the Seattle Police “as transparent as possible”, seeing the advantage that it will “dispel myths about policing,” adding: “I think the public should know everything that doesn’t compromise an investigation.”

She will be out in the community, but not in the manner of some limelight-loving police chiefs.

“I don’t want it to be about me: It should be about the organization and how well it is working,” O’Toole said.

Interesting to note: Seattle is an increasingly diverse city. But three of the city’s principal government actors — Murray, U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan and O’Toole — will be Irish Americans.